Specialist-generalist trade-offs in microbial growth rates across soil habitats.

Bacterial specialists in annual grassland soils grew faster than bacterial generalists within the habitats where they were detected, supporting a niche-breadth versus growth-rate trade-off.

• Why it matters: Soil carbon and nutrient cycling depends on how microbes balance peak performance against persistence across root-influenced habitats, which remains unclear in rhizosphere–detritusphere systems.
• What they did: Using H2 18 O quantitative stable isotope probing (qSIP), the study measured active bacterial and fungal growth rates in the rhizosphere, detritusphere, and rhizosphere + root detritus, classifying taxa as specialists or generalists by where growth occurred.
• The result: Specialist and generalist bacterial communities showed phylogenetic randomness while total bacterial communities were clustered, implying realized growth breadth aligns more with functional traits than lineage, and may help predict soil-carbon trajectories under changing plant inputs.

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